#87 Inconsistent license between the source file and project

[Kohsuke Kawaguchi]

Some of the source files, such as the JSONObject class, include the "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." license.
Unfortunately, this doesn't satisfy the OSI definition of the open-source <http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd>, section 6 in particular.
It is also inconsistent with the license statement of the Maven-generated project <http://json-lib.sourceforge.net/license.html>

AFAIK, there are two possible solutions here. If the intention of this project is to rally behind the
"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" dogma, please update the license page of the website,
so that people can easily find out what the license of the project really is.

If the intention of this project is really to write an open-source JSON implementation. Then please
replace the problematic files from the version from http://json.org/java/apache.zip
(see http://markmail.org/message/tgugrzi2unaowerh for more context of this), which is under the ASL.

------------------

/*
Copyright (c) 2002 JSON.org

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
*/

[aalmiray]

Hi Kohsuke,

The project is indeed an Open Source one licensed under ASL 2.0
http://json-lib.sourceforge.net/license.html

We kept the original license notice from json.org as a nod to Douglas' work.
Would that be enough for you?

Cheers,
Andres

[Nobody/Anonymous]

I guess the main question is whether json-lib includes code that is copyrighted by JSON.org.

If so (for example, if you copied the code), that portion is copyrighted by him, and therefore the portion is governed by its license term, which includes "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" clause (I'll call it the JSON.org license onward.) And I hope you agree that the JSON.org license does not satisfy the section 6 of the open-source definition.

If that is the case, json-lib as a whole is not under ASL --- it's a mixture of ASL and the JSON.org license, and because it contains a portion that's not OSD compliant, json-lib as a whole is not open-source, despite the fact that the rest of the code you wrote is covered by ASL.

Put another way, if you copy someone else's code, you have more obligations than just nodding to his work.

If, OTOH, you wrote the entire code from scratch, then the project as a whole is indeed under ASL. If that is the case, please remove the copyright statement of JSON.org, since they obviously don't own the copyright for the code you wrote. If you feel you need to acknowledge the work of Douglas, by all means put an acknowledgement in the source file, but please do not put a secondary copyright statement.

Looking at the code, I assumed that you did indeed copy the code from JSON.org. And if so, I was trying to point out that JSON.org sort of eventually made its source code dual-license between the JSON.org license and the ASL (which you can see in the URL I posted.) Therefore, that allows you to use JSON.org code under the terms of ASL, which will truly make the entire json-lib available under the ASL, bringing it back to OSD compliant.

And again, assuming that that is the position you'd like to take, I believe you now need to replace the JSON.org license in your source tree with the ASL.

Am I making sense to you?

[aalmiray]

Thank you for the detailed explanation, that makes perfect sense now.
I'll update the license on the relevant files to make it fully OSD compliant :-)

Cheers,
Andres